When once the spring is in full tide towards summer, it is difficult to say where one should search for special beauty in England, for all is so beautiful, from the Yorkshire hills to the Sussex marshes beloved of Coventry Patmore—flat lands whose drowsy beauties glow under the broad sunshine and suggest a tranquil charm of quiet joy tinged with melancholy, too subtle to appeal to the casual "tripper," but of insistent call to all who understood the more intimate charms of Nature. It is spacious is Sussex. It shelters solitudes. Its quiet, slow-voiced people are sympathetic with their surroundings. When storms rage Sussex takes a new aspect. The screaming of the gulls, the sobbing of the sedges in the wind, the wide, flat expanse laid, as it were, bare to the rage of the storm, gives to the wind a sense of poignant desolation.
In Sussex, when Henry VIII. was king, many "great cannones and shotters were caste for His Majestie's service"; and the county was notable for its iron mines and foundries. From Sussex earlier had come all of the 3000 horseshoes on which an English king's army had galloped to ruin at Bannockburn. Owing to the iron in the soil the Sussex streams sometimes run red, so that "at times the grounde weepes bloud." Now there is an end of iron-working there. The foundry at Ashburnham, the last of the Sussex furnaces, was closed down in 1828. One reason given was that the workers were too drunken, helped as they were to unsober habits by the facilities for smuggling in Holland's gin.
But more probably the Sussex ironworks closed down in the main for the same reason that other southern works did. The past two centuries have seen a gradual transference of the great industries and the great centres of population from the south to the north-west and the Midlands. The northern coal mines are the real magnets. So the Sussex iron-workers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries may not justly be accused of killing an industry with their dissolute love of Holland's gin. Their country is to-day the more picturesque without the iron foundries, though one may give a sigh to Sussex iron, which had the repute of being the toughest in all England.
I have given this little space to Sussex, by way of proof that everywhere in England there is beauty, for Sussex is not a "scenery" county in the general sense. It will, indeed, prove puzzling to my imaginary pilgrim in search of the highest natural beauty of England to find time within one spring and summer to get an idea of its wide variety of charm. Fortunate he if he resists all temptation to rush (by motor car or otherwise) through a "comprehensive tour" mapped out by hours. I remember encountering—with deep pity on my part—a group of delegates to some great Imperial Conference, who were being "shown England" by some misguided and misguiding official. They were at Oxford for lunch, and were due to "do" Oxford and lunch—or rather lunch and Oxford—within three hours. Motoring up they had already "done" a great deal of country in a morning, including a visit to Banbury. After lunch—and Oxford—they were on their way to Worcester and yet farther that day. It was an unhappy experiment in quick-change scenery, proving conclusively the cleverness of motor cars and the stupidity of human beings.
A SUSSEX VILLAGE
May and June in this fancied Pilgrimage of Beauty should be given up wholly to the Thames valley from Greenwich to Oxford, and past. An intelligent lover of the beautiful in Nature and Art will at least learn in those two months that a life-time is not sufficient for due faithful worship at all the shrines of Beauty he will encounter. My pilgrim has now seen wild coast scenery and river scenery. July should be given to the hills and the lakes, these enchanting lakes which have won new beauties from the poets and wise men who dwelt by them. Then August to the Yorkshire Wolds, with their sweeping outlines, clear in the amber air shining over white roads and blue-green fields.
The attractions of the Yorkshire Wolds are proof against the wet sea-mists, the penetrating winds, and the merciless rain which sometimes sweep over them. The very severity of the weather appeals to nature lovers. The Yorkshire Wolds terminate on the east with the great Flamborough headland, the chalky cliffs of which have remarkable strength to resist ocean erosion. Owing to this fact Flamborough headland has been for centuries becoming more and more the outstanding feature of the east coast of England, because the sea continues to eat into the low shores of Holderness.
With the end of August comes the end of the English summer (though at times it ends at a very much earlier date, and offers with its brief life poor reason for having appeared at all; "seeing that I was so soon to be done for, why ever was I begun for"). It is then time to go to Kent and see the burnishing of the woods by Autumn, the ripening of hop and apple. To the New Forest afterwards, and the sands of the south coast. At the end of the year our pilgrim will know how varied is the beauty of the English landscape, and how faithfully it is loved in its different forms by those who live near to it.